Various types of biometric systems are used more and more in order to provide for increased security and/or enhanced user convenience.
In particular fingerprint sensing systems have been adopted in, for example, consumer electronic devices, thanks to their small form factor, high performance and user acceptance.
Among the various available fingerprint sensing principles (such as capacitive, optical, thermal etc.), capacitive sensing is most commonly used, in particular in applications where size and power consumption are important issues.
All capacitive fingerprint sensors provide a measure indicative of the capacitance between several sensing structures and a finger placed on or moved across the surface of the fingerprint sensor.
Some capacitive fingerprint sensors passively read out the capacitance between the sensing structures and the finger. This, however, requires a relatively large capacitance. Therefore such passive capacitive sensors are typically provided with a very thin protective layer covering the sensing structures, which makes such sensors rather sensitive to scratching and/or ESD (electro-static discharge).
U.S. Pat. No. 7,864,992 discloses a fingerprint sensing system in which a finger excitation signal is injected into the finger by pulsing a conductive structure arranged in the vicinity of the sensor array and measuring the resulting change of the charge carried by the sensing structures in the sensor array.
Although the fingerprint sensing system according to U.S. Pat. No. 7,864,992 provides for an excellent combination of fingerprint image quality and sensor protection, there appears to be room for further improvement at least in certain applications.